The Fist of God

“Oh, yes, I’ll get that sorted out at once,” said Paxman.

Martin nodded, said “Thanks,” and walked into the cool of the villa. Paxman and Barber came in behind him. Barber was privately elated.

“Damn,” he thought to himself. “I do believe this bastard could even do it.”

It took three consecutive baths in the marble tub of the villa, obtained for the British by Prince Khaled bin Sultan, for Martin to scrape off the dirt and sweat of weeks. He sat with a towel around his waist while a barber summoned for the purpose gave his matted hair a cut, then he shaved with Simon Paxman’s wash-kit.

His keffiyeh , blanket, robes, and sandals had been taken away to the garden, where a Saudi servant had turned them into a satisfactory bonfire. Two hours later, in a pair of Paxman’s light cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, Mike Martin sat at the dining table and contemplated a five-course lunch.

“Would you mind telling me,” he asked, “why you pulled me out?”

It was Chip Barber who answered.

“Good question, Major. Damn good question. Deserves a damn good answer. Right? Fact is, we’d like you to go into Baghdad. Next week. Salad or fish?”

Chapter 10

Both the CIA and the SIS were in a hurry. Although little mention was made of it then or since, by late October there had been established in Riyadh a very large CIA presence and operation.

Before too long, the CIA presence was at loggerheads with the military chieftaincy a mile away in the warren of planning rooms beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry. The mood, certainly of the air generals, was one of conviction that with the skillful use of the amazing array of technical wizardry at their disposal, they could ascertain all they needed to know about Iraq’s defenses and preparations.

And an amazing array it was. Apart from the satellites in space supplying their constant stream of pictures of the land of Saddam Hussein; apart from the Aurora and the U-2 doing the same but at closer range, there were other machines of daunting complexity dedicated to providing airborne information.

Another breed of satellite, in geosynchronous position, hovering over the Middle East, was ded

icated to listening to what the Iraqis said, and these satellites caught every word uttered on an open line. They could not catch the planning conferences held on those 45,000 miles of buried fiber-optic cables.

Among the airplanes, chief was the Airborne Warning and Control System, known as AWACS. These were Boeing 707 airliners, carrying a huge radar dome mounted on their backs. Turning in slow circles over the northern Gulf, on twenty-four-hour rotating shifts, the AWACS could inform Riyadh within seconds of any air movement over Iraq. Hardly an Iraqi plane could move or mission take off but Riyadh knew its number, heading, course speed, and altitude.

Backing up the AWACS was another Boeing 707 conversion, the E8-A, known as J-STAR, which did for movements on the ground what AWACS did for movements in the air. With its big Norden radar scanning downward and sideways, so that it could cover Iraq without ever entering Iraqi airspace, the J-STAR could pick up almost any piece of metal that began to move.

The combination of these and many more technical miracles on which Washington had spent billions and billions of dollars convinced the generals that if it was said, they could hear it, if it moved, they could see it, and if they knew about it, they could destroy it. They could do it, moreover, come rain or fog, night or day. Never again would the enemy be able to shelter under a canopy of jungle trees and escape detection. The eyes-in-the-sky would see it all.

The intelligence officers from Langley were skeptical, and it showed. Doubts were for civilians. In the face of this the military became irritable. It had a tough job to do, it was going to do it, and cold water it did not need.

On the British side the situation was different. The SIS operation in the Gulf Theater was nothing like that of the CIA, but it was still a large operation by the standards of Century House, and in the manner of Century it was lower profile and more secretive.

Moreover, the British had appointed as commander of all U.K. forces in the Gulf, and second-in-command to General Schwarzkopf, an unusual soldier of uncommon background.

Norman Schwarzkopf was a big, burly man of considerable military prowess and very much a soldier’s soldier. Known either as Stormin’ Norman or “the Bear,” his mood could vary from genial bonhomie to explosions of temper, always short-lived, which his staff referred to as the general going ballistic. His British counterpart could not have been more different.

Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billière, who had arrived in early October to take command of the Brits, was a deceptively slight, lean, wiry man of diffident manner and reluctant speech. The big American extrovert and the slim British introvert made an odd partnership, which succeeded only because each knew enough of the other to recognize what lay behind the up-front presentation.

Sir Peter, known to the troops as P.B., was the most decorated soldier in the British Army, a matter of which he would never speak under any circumstances. Only those who had been with him in his various campaigns would occasionally mutter into their beer glasses of the icy cool under fire that had caused all those “gongs” to be pinned to his tunic. He had also once been commanding officer of the SAS, a background that gave him a most useful knowledge of the Gulf, of Arabic, and of covert operations.

Because the British commander had worked before with the SIS, the Century House team found in him a more accustomed ear to listen to their reservations than in the CIA group.

The SAS already had a good presence in the Gulf Theater, holed up in their own secluded camp in the corner of a larger military base outside Riyadh. As a former commander of these men, General P.B. was concerned that their remarkable talents should not be wasted on workaday tasks that infantry or paratroopers could do. These men were specialists in deep penetration and hostage-recovery.

Sitting in that villa outside Riyadh during the last week of October, the CIA and SIS team came up with an operation that was very much within the scope of the SAS. The operation was put to the local SAS

commander, and he went to work on his planning.

The entire afternoon of Mike Martin’s first day at the villa was spent in explaining to him the discovery by the Anglo-American Allies of the existence of the renegade in Baghdad who had been code-named Jericho. They told him he still had the right to refuse and to rejoin the regiment. During the evening he thought it over. Then he told the CIA-SIS briefing officers:

“I’ll go in. But I have my conditions, and I want them met.”

The main problem, they all acknowledged, would be his cover story. This was not a quick in-and-out mission, depending on speed and daring to outwit the counterintelligence net. Nor could he count on covert support and assistance such as he had met in Kuwait. Nor could he wander the desert outside Baghdad as an errant Bedou tribesman. All Iraq was by then a great armed camp. Even areas that on the map seemed desolate and empty were crisscrossed with army patrols. Inside Baghdad, Army and AMAM check-squads were everywhere, the Military Police looking for deserters and the AMAM for anyone at all who might be suspicious.